Global User Experience in the Future - A Digital Supply Chain?
Continuing from our previous post where I thought aloud (like a good UX professional) whether the future of global UX was going the N=1, R=G direction…this time I would like to visualize how N=1, R=G could manifest.
Consider that the future of work, as per futurists, will involve less and less fulltime and 1job scenarios. Instead, it will be common to find everyone working part time at multiple places.
Organisations, in the future, will increasingly have to think very seriously about how to provide localized solutions to their product and service users who are located in the emerging countries of the world. After all, the emerging market forecast for growth in consumption in the future is considered to be the biggest growth opportunity in the history of capitalism according to McKinsey and Company.
What about the users who are located in the emerging countries? They will demand solutions that take into account their local requirements and not just cheaper or bad quality avatars of designs from the supposed first world.
Well, taking all these factors into account, I posit one likely scenario.
Organisations will, in the future, source global UX components from their UX supply chain, just like they source components for physical products today.
This global supply chain will consist of several UX marketplace hubs where UX professionals from around the world (who will be freelancers) will upload UX components they have created (a set of personas, localized forms designed for a set of countries, tips about must have features for device banking in a specific country, training modules, design templates, etc.). This will be very much like the components of an item of clothing that are sourced from different factories around the world today. In fact, this scenario has already started to play out (although in its nascent stages) in the world of software coding!
Organisations looking for localizing their products and services will explore these UX supply chains and buy the components they need. In addition they will be able to contact the creators of the UX components to source more customized UX components.
Further, organisations will have a central UX team that will specialize in methods of putting these UX components (sourced from the digital supply chain), together in sophisticated and creative ways. This will enable them to deliver very personalized experiences to their users in a timely and cost effective manner.
OF course, this will be a digital supply chain and not a physical one and hence there will be no devastating factory collapse disasters like we witnessed in Bangladesh recently!
IF this is a possible ‘sourcing’ scenario, what could be the equivalent ‘creation’ scenario for global UX?
Next time, we will explore that.